The Afro American Novel And Its Tradition

This study is an addition to the growing body of scholarly analysis examining the Afro-American contribution. It is based on the premise that in the last 25 years the traditional canon of American literature excluded important minority authors. Proceeding chronologically from William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), to experimental novels of the 1980s, Bell comments on more than 150 works, with close readings of 41 novelists. His remarks are framed by an inquiry into the distinctive elements of Afro-American fiction. ISBN 0-87023-568-0 : $25.00.

In 1987 Bernard W. Bell published "The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition", a comprehensive interpretive history of more than 150 novels written by African Americans from 1853 to 1983. This is a sequel and companion to the earlier work, expanding the coverage to 2001.

This book is written by teachers interested in bringing African American literature into the classroom. Documented here is the learning process that these educators experienced themselves as they read and discussed the stories & pedagogical.

Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel restores to its rightful place a body of American literature that has long been overlooked, dismissed, or misjudged. This insightful reconsideration of nineteenth-century African-American fiction uncovers the literary artistry and ideological complexity of a body of work that laid the foundation for the Harlem Renaissance and changed the course of American letters. Focusing on the trope of passing -- black characters lightskinned enough to pass for white -- M. Giulia Fabi shows how early African-American authors such as William Wells Brown, Frank J. Webb, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, James Weldon Johnson, Frances E. W. Harper, and Edward A. Johnson transformed traditional representations of blackness and moved beyond the tragic mulatto motif. Celebrating a distinctive, African-American history, culture, and worldview, these authors used passing to challenge the myths of racial purity and the color line. Fabi examines how early black writers adapted existing literary forms, including the sentimental romance, the domestic novel, and the utopian novel, to express their convictions and concerns about slavery, segregation, and racism. She also gives a historical overview of the canon-making enterprises of African-American critics from the 1850s to the 1990s and considers how their concerns about crafting a particular image for African-American literature affected their perceptions of nineteenth-century black fiction.

This History is intended for a broad audience seeking knowledge of how novels interact with and influence their cultural landscape. Its interdisciplinary approach will appeal to those interested in novels and film, graphic novels, novels and popular culture, transatlantic blackness, and the interfacing of race, class, gender, and aesthetics.

From the earliest texts of the colonial period to works contemporary with Emancipation, African American literature has been a dialogue across color lines, and a medium through which black writers have been able to exert considerable authority on both sides of that racial demarcation. Dickson D. Bruce argues that contrary to prevailing perceptions of African American voices as silenced and excluded from American history, those voices were loud and clear. Within the context of the wider culture, these writers offered powerful, widely read, and widely appreciated commentaries on American ideals and ambitions. The Origins of African American Literature provides strong evidence to demonstrate just how much writers engaged in a surprising number of dialogues with society as a whole. Along with an extensive discussion of major authors and texts, including Phillis Wheatley's poetry, Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Martin Delany's Blake, Bruce explores less-prominent works and writers as well, thereby grounding African American writing in its changing historical settings. The Origins of African American Literature is an invaluable revelation of the emergence and sources of the specifically African American literary tradition and the forces that helped shape it.

In this groundbreaking book Charles Scruggs identifies the black urban experience as a driving force behind the twentieth-century Afro-American novel, resulting in a rich fictional tradition that runs from Paul Laurence Dunbar's "The Sport of the Gods" through Toni Morrison's "Beloved." Scruggs begins by discussing the treatment of the Great Migration to the city in Afro-American writing from W. E. B. DuBois and Dunbar through the Harlem writers, establishing both the continuities and breaks between that tradition and that of the writers coming after the Depression. He then considers how four post-Harlem Renaissance novelists--Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison--conceive of the modern city. Scruggs shows how these four writers see the Afro-American's relationship to elite, popular, and mass forms of culture in city life. He also explores the ways in which their writing presents "alternative spaces" that exist alongside of, and often counter to, the visible configurations of the dominant culture.